The Microsoft BizSpark program offers FREE stuff to Startups for 3 years. This includes software, service, technical support, as well as Microsoft Azure cloud service usage. This offers a huge advantage to small, startups looking to build a product, but possibly don’t have the revenue to afford MSDN Subscriptions or Microsoft Azure services. With BizSpark, startups can afford these things while they grow their revenue while starting out. Read More

The book “Microsoft Azure Essentials: Fundamentals of Azure” has been made available as a Free eBook from Microsoft Press and Microsoft Virtual Academy. This book is written by Michael Collier and Robin Shahan.

The material covered in this book are targeted towards introducing both Developers and IT Professionals to the huge range of features and capabilities within the Microsoft Azure platform. Read More

On Feb 3, 2016, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Azure IoT Hub is now Generally Available (GA). Azure IoT Hub service is available stand-alone or as one of the services within the Microsoft Azure IoT Suite. With GA comes support for the 99.9% SLA that wasn’t available in Preview; including new General Availability pricing that will go into effect on April 1, 2016.

Azure IoT Hub offers a fully managed IaaS solution for enabling bidrectional communications between the Azure Cloud and IoT Devices (like Raspberry Pi 2 and others). Microsoft Azure IoT Hub offers a few built-in features such as Security, Scalability and Reliability; while implementing standard protocols like HTTP and AMQP 1.0, AMQP over WebSockets, and MQTT.

Join Mark Russinovich (Azure CTO) and Jeffrey Snover (Enterprise Cloud Technical Fellow) in learning how Microsoft Azure Stack will help drive innovation by delivering Azure based solutions within your own data center in this short video. Microsoft Azure Stack brings the Cloud to your data center on your terms to enable the deployment of Azure based services on-premises in the hybrid cloud. Read More

There’s been a huge increase in the need to get trained in Microsoft Azure, and as a result the interest / need to get certified in Azure has been increasing as well. The only difficulty with the certification is there are 3 primary Microsoft certification exams on Azure and it can be a little unclear which exam is right for “You.” In this article I will outline the differences between the different Azure certification exams / certifications, and hopefully I’ll help you decide which is best for you to start with.

Update 9/30/2016: This week Microsoft announced some really big and amazing changes to the Microsoft Certification program and how the Azure certification exams fit in with MCSD and MCSE certifications. As a result, you want to reference the 2016 Edition of Where to start with Azure Certification article instead.

The “Microsoft Azure Essentials: Azure Web Apps for Developers” book written by Rick Rainey has been made available as a Free eBook on the Microsoft Virtual Academy website. This book covers the necessary information to help developers advance their technical skills in developing, deploying and managing Web Applications hosted within the Microsoft Azure platform using the Web Apps feature set. This book is written to target .NET developers from beginner to advanced. Read More

Microsoft Azure Stack is a fairly new feature set to complement the Azure Platform, however, Azure Stack isn’t quite the usual feature addition to the Microsoft Azure Platform. Azure contains features such as App Service (Web Apps, Logic Apps, Mobile Apps, API Apps), Storage (Blobs, Tables, Queues), Virtual Machines, Virtual Network, Load Balancer, VPN Gateway, Management Portal, Key Vault, and Azure SDK. Until now, when a new feature was released for Microsoft Azure it was hosted like the previous list; in the Azure cloud within Microsoft data centers. Azure Stack changes this; it changes EVERYTHING! With Microsoft Azure Stack, you will now be able to host all the Azure services I just listed within your own Enterprise datacenter; within your private cloud. Azure Stack brings with it a huge innovation to the hybrid-cloud ecosystem. This article will describe exactly what this means for Developers, IT Pros and the rest of the Enterprise. Read More

The book “Microsoft Azure Essentials: Azure Automation” written by Michael McKeown is written to target IT Pros and PowerShell developers to help them understand the core concepts of Azure Automation. This includes using runbooks based on PowerShell Workflow, and orchestrating frequent deployment (ala DevOps) and life cycle management through the use of automating Azure resource setup and maintenance. Read More

Security and reliability are 2 huge problem areas to overcome with the Internet of Things (IoT). The Microsoft Azure IoT Hub is the cloud solution Microsoft has created to grant developers a solution to both the reliability and security problems. Azure IoT Hub provides a fully managed IaaS solution for enabling bidirectional communications between IoT devices and the Azure Cloud. Read More

Another year means another Global Azure Bootcamp. The Global Azure Bootcamp 2016 is the fourth annual Azure Bootcamp. This is a global event that provides a single day, deep dive class helping thousands of people learn about building Cloud Computing Applications on the Microsoft Azure platform.